Colombia votes on whether to fight its endless war or keep talking to it

World News 5 min 80 sources

A presidential runoff Sunday pits a hard-line crackdown against a decade-old peace strategy — as Bolivia sends in the army, Congo's Ebola toll climbs, and a rare climate pattern unsettles global markets.

Key takeaways

Colombia votes Sunday between a hard-line military crackdown and a decade-old strategy of negotiating with armed groups — at the country's most violent point since its 2016 peace deal.
Across Latin America, governments are turning to force: Bolivia declared a state of emergency and sent the army to clear six weeks of road blockades that left cities short of fuel, food, and medicine.
Congo's Ebola outbreak keeps climbing toward 1,000 cases, and markets are starting to price in a rare "Super El Niño" that could raise food prices and inflation into 2027.

The choice Colombia makes today

More than 41 million Colombians can vote on Sunday in a presidential runoff that turns on one question: how do you end a war that has lasted six decades? [1] The two men on the ballot answer it in opposite ways.

The frontrunner is Abelardo de la Espriella — a far-right lawyer and millionaire who calls himself “El Tigre,” admires Donald Trump, and holds US citizenship. [1][3] He has promised ten mega-prisons, a military crackdown, and an end to negotiating with armed groups. [3] His opponent is Iván Cepeda, a 63-year-old leftwing senator and the architect of outgoing President Gustavo Petro’s “total peace” plan — the strategy of negotiating the disarmament of every criminal group rather than fighting them. [1][3]

The vote comes at the most violent moment since Colombia’s landmark 2016 peace deal, which disarmed thousands of fighters from the FARC, the country’s largest former rebel army. [1][4] Since then, illegal armed groups — FARC splinter factions, the ELN guerrillas, and the Clan del Golfo crime syndicate — have roughly doubled their membership in five years, expanding control over rural land used for drug trafficking and illegal mining. [3]

The human cost is plain. “My brother was murdered for not paying an extortion payment, in front of his children,” Edilma Martínez Flores told the BBC at a centre for displaced people in Bogotá. [3] She fled Cali after armed groups handed out leaflets ordering residents to leave. The campaign itself was marked by an assassination, kidnappings, and bombings. [3]

Why this matters beyond Colombia. It is the latest in a regional swing toward strongmen promising an iron fist on crime — echoing Keiko Fujimori’s lead in Peru and José Antonio Kast’s win in Chile. [1] The winner takes office on 7 August and inherits nearly half a million conflict deaths’ worth of unfinished business. [4] For anyone tracking Latin America: watch whether a crackdown government can hold while armed groups are at peak strength — the same bet that has failed before.

Bolivia sends in the army

On Saturday, Bolivia’s president declared a 90-day state of emergency and deployed soldiers and bulldozers to clear road blockades that have paralysed the country for more than six weeks. [6][30]

Unions, Indigenous groups, and coca farmers have blocked roads with rubble, logs, and debris to protest the conservative government — the first non-socialist administration Bolivia has had in two decades. [30] The blockades have caused acute shortages of fuel, food, and medicine, cost the economy billions, and threatened to topple the government. [30] President Rodrigo Paz warned protesters in a pre-dawn televised address that they would face “the full force of the law.” [30] The emergency curbs the right to protest and lets the military operate inside the country. [30]

Taken together with Colombia, the two stories rhyme: across the region, governments are reaching for force to settle disputes that years of politics could not. The number to watch: whether Bolivia’s shortages ease within the 90-day window, or whether the crackdown hardens the standoff.

What Khartoum and Kinshasa are facing

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, confirmed Ebola cases rose to 956 with 247 deaths as of Saturday — up from 933 cases and 245 deaths a day earlier. [11] Ebola is a viral disease that spreads through contact with the bodily fluids of the infected and kills a large share of those it reaches. The day-on-day jump — 23 new confirmed cases — points to an outbreak still climbing, not cresting. [11] The reach is already crossing borders: a suspected case is being treated at a hospital in Haifa, Israel, in a patient who recently travelled from the DRC. [36]

A climate pattern markets are starting to price

As fears over the Iran war recede, investors are turning to a different risk: a high probability of a rare “Super El Niño” heading into 2027. [24] El Niño is a periodic warming of the Pacific Ocean that scrambles weather worldwide. A strong one could push temperatures up in parts of the world, send power demand surging, hurt crop yields, and reignite inflation — complicating life for central banks and for stock markets trading near record highs. [24] The thread to follow: this is a weather forecast becoming a market forecast. When traders start hedging crop yields and insurance losses months ahead, the cost of a coming drought lands long before the drought does.

Briefly

Germany, pensions: A government commission will propose on Tuesday raising the retirement age in step with life expectancy — reaching 70 by 2092 — and creating a Sweden-style state pension fund that invests workers’ contributions. [47] It is Europe’s largest economy confronting an ageing population and strained public finances.
Bangladesh, diplomacy: New Prime Minister Tarique Rahman leaves Sunday on his first foreign trip, courting investment in Malaysia and China, where his government hopes to sign 15–17 bilateral deals including the long-delayed Teesta River project. [5]
Libya, migration: At least 15 migrant bodies washed ashore in eastern Libya, a reminder of the Mediterranean’s continuing toll on people trying to reach Europe. [26]
Greece, seismic: A magnitude 5.8 earthquake struck southwest of Crete; no major damage was immediately reported. [27]

The story nobody’s covering

Bangladesh is “doubling down” on an effort to recover an estimated $230 billion it says was siphoned out of the country during the previous government — a sum larger than the entire economies of many nations. [40] Most stolen-asset recovery efforts fail, because money laundered abroad disappears into shell companies and friendly jurisdictions faster than any state can trace it. If even a fraction comes back, it would be one of the largest asset-recovery cases ever attempted — a test of whether a poorer country can claw stolen wealth out of richer financial systems. Worth watching for anyone who follows how money crosses borders and who gets to keep it.

02 · Lesson · why it matters

Why a cure that fails leaves us hungry for its opposite

When a long problem won't end, people don't fix the remedy — they swing to its mirror image, and each swing plants the reason for the next one.

Two men, two cures, one wound

Colombia votes today on how to end a war that is older than most of the people voting. One candidate says: stop talking, fight. Ten mega-prisons, the army, no more deals. The other says: keep talking, disarm them at the table, the way the 2016 peace deal disarmed thousands. Both men are answering the same wound — six decades of killing, half a million dead. They have landed on opposite cures.

What’s worth noticing is not which cure is right. It’s the shape of how a country gets here.

The swing

For years, Colombia tried force. Then, exhausted, it tried peace — the 2016 deal, then “total peace,” the plan to negotiate with everyone. Now, with violence at its worst since that deal and armed groups doubled in size, the country looks ready to swing back to force.

This is a pendulum. When a remedy is in charge and the problem keeps hurting, people rarely conclude “this remedy needs more time” or “this remedy needs adjusting.” They conclude “this remedy is the problem,” and they reach for its opposite. The harder the failure feels, the wider the swing.

It isn’t stupidity. It’s how people reason under a problem that outlasts patience. The current cure is the one you can blame, because it’s the one in the room.

Each cure plants the next one’s reason

Here is the part that’s easy to miss. The two cures are not just alternatives. Each one creates the conditions the other will point to.

Years of military crackdown can crush armed groups in one valley and scatter them into three others — and leave behind enough grief and broken trust that, eventually, “let’s negotiate instead” sounds like wisdom. Then years of negotiation can hand armed groups a ceasefire they use to expand — until “they’re only getting stronger, send in the army” sounds like the obvious truth.

The peace strategy’s critics say exactly this: that armed groups exploited the talks to grow. They may be right. But the crackdown that came before is part of why there were so many groups to talk to. Neither cure is applied to a clean slate. Each is applied to the mess the last one left.

The clock no one is watching

A cure for a sixty-year war needs more than a four-year term to work. But the people living it can’t wait sixty years, and the people governing it are measured every four. So a remedy that might pay off slowly gets judged on a fast clock — and abandoned before anyone can know whether it was working or just hadn’t finished.

This is why the swing keeps happening. Not because every remedy is wrong, but because almost no remedy is given long enough to be proven right. We change the medicine before the body has answered. And the change itself — the lurch from one approach to its opposite — is its own cost. Armed groups learn that every few years the rules flip. They plan around the flip.

We are on the pendulum, not above it

It’s tempting to read this and feel clever — to see the swing from the outside and think the answer is obvious, that these people should just pick the right cure and stick to it.

But the pendulum isn’t a Colombian flaw. It’s how almost everyone reasons about a problem that won’t end. We do it with crime, with schools, with our own habits — try a thing, hurt anyway, blame the thing, lunge for its opposite, forget that the opposite failed us last time. The voter in Bogotá choosing the iron fist and the person who quit one diet for its mirror image are running the same loop. The grocery shopper whose food bill climbs when a drought far away hits a harvest is inside the same web of slow problems and fast blame.

Seeing the swing doesn’t lift you off it. It just lets you notice when you’re mid-arc — when you’re about to abandon something not because you’ve proven it failed, but because you’re tired and it’s the thing you can reach.

On the whole

A country picking between two cures is not choosing good over bad. It is choosing which familiar failure it has more recently forgotten. The deepest thing the pendulum teaches is humility about our own certainty: the cure that looks obviously right today is usually the one whose costs we haven’t felt yet. None of us — voter, president, or onlooker an ocean away — can see the whole arc from inside a single swing. We can only hold our conviction a little more loosely, knowing the medicine we’re sure of now is the one the next swing will blame.

03 · Lab · your turn

The Pendulum

Rehearse choosing a cure for a long problem, then resisting the pull to swing to its opposite the moment it hurts.

04 · Hope · carry this

A country sixty years into its own war is still settling the question with ballots, not bullets — and 41 million people lining up to decide together is its own quiet proof that the argument is not over.